Fantastic Four: Rise of The Silver Surfer PS3 User Review

4.0

The game follows a storyline different from that of the movie, though it begins with the wedding of Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman that was shown in the movie. As there, Silver Surfer and Dr. Doom show up and throw a monkey wrench into the mix, leading to the story that you end up having to play. While it's actually a good take on the events from the movie, the story doesn't bring Galactus in almost at all, so when the story reaches its conclusion it stops making good sense, resulting in something of a let down considering how well they had done so far.

This action game plays like most other third-person games of this sort. You'll switch between all four of the Fantastic Four characters throughout the game, generally in order to solve one of the many puzzles that are a part of it. These puzzles will often require the use of the special abilities of your characters, which are reproduced in the game itself. These skills aren't fully implemented, however, since there are lots of inconsistencies. For example, The Thing can smash through some walls, and not others, and Invisible Woman can move past some of the lasers beams, but others will block her from moving past. These inconsistencies make the game feel a lot more linear than it had to, especially considering that most of the game is hitting one switch to turn off a barrier and then moving on and doing it again.

The characters that you use aren't very well balanced, either. As you play through, you will get the opportunity to upgrade your characters. These upgrades will undoubtedly focus on the most effective upgrades for your team, meaning that the weaker characters will end up missing out on upgrade opportunities. There are missions where you will be taking individual characters through levels, but they won't need to be very upgraded to handle those levels, resulting in them not doing much to force you to balance out your upgrading.

While good visuals would help a little bit, they are unfortunately lacking there too. There are only a few different kinds of enemies, which you'll see tons before you're done. Your characters don't look nearly as detailed or fluid as they could, and the areas all look pretty well identical. There are also issues with the camera angle and with slowdown when large battles come up.

All told, Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver Surfer could have been left on the comic strips, and people would have gotten as much, or more enjoyment than they will get out of playing this game. Unless you're an enormous fan, consider another beat-'em-up game.